Ramayana & Mahabharata Tag

Do Indians have a sense of history? No is pretty much the received wisdom even today in major sections of the academia, media and the rest. If you as much as question the sources, the roots of this received wisdom, you are branded with the choicest of Leftist labels but that’s the least of our concerns. Before looking at a “sense of history” or “historical sense,” we need to look at how history is defined. Commonly accepted definitions include: A study of the human past. A field of research whichRead More

Read the previous parts: 1, 2, 3, and 4. Why shouldn’t we be outraged, why shouldn’t millions be outraged, when a woman writes a piece that’s based on factual errors, falsification, and selective reading about women that millions of Indians regard as role models? What exactly gives Nilanjana Roy the right to insult the icons and role models of other people based on her worldview of how women should be? If Nilanjana Roy for example, calls Surpanakha a wronged woman based on convenient and/or selective readings, I can in theRead More

Read the previous parts: 1, 2, and 3. So where were we? Popular discussion? Niyoga? No…well, yes, we were at the three princesses: Amba, Ambika and Ambalika. Pardon my confusion. I mean, confusion happens when Nilanjana Roy mixes up timelines. Imagine my plight: she begins with Sita, then moves to Draupadi. Correct: from Treta Yuga to Dwapara Yuga. Then she spends some time in Dwapara Yuga. Suddenly she reverts to Treta Yuga, she reverts to Shurpanakha. But does she stop there? No. Without warning, she drags in Hidimbi. ThatRead More

Read Parts 1 and 2. After trying to force-fit Draupadi into the feminist mould, Nilanjana Roy sets her sights on Amba, Ambika and Ambalika in yet another extremely revealing paragraph. Amba is, again, silenced in popular discussion, and yet her story remains both remarkable and disquieting — the woman who will even become a man in order to wreak revenge on the man who first abducts and then rejects her. There is nothing easy about her story, as anyone who has tried to rewrite the Mahabharata knows; or about theRead More

Is Draupadi Rarely Referenced? After failing to show how Sita’s abduction by Ravana and her abandonment by Rama qualify as “rape” and/or “sexual assault,” Nilanjana Roy turns to Draupadi whom she characterizes as follows: Draupadi’s story is rarely referenced, though it is powerfully told in the Mahabharata. Draupadi’s reaction, after Krishna rescues her from Dushasana’s assault while her husbands and clan elders sit by in passive silence, is not meek gratitude. She berates the men for their complicity and their refusal to defend her; instead of the shame visited onRead More

Introduction Nilanjana Roy’s Business Standard piece on Jan 08, 2013 entitled A woman alone in the forest is just the latest in what has become a much-lauded fad. A fad whose staple diet consists of a distorted reading of Indian epics, misinterpretations aplenty, sleights of hand, concealment, and open falsehood. We’ve seen the disastrous results of what happens when such untruths come to be accepted as truth—simply put, they multiply and over time gain such wide currency that even when the truth is pointed out, people simply dismiss it asRead More

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Few things pollute the atmosphere worse than a slighted journalist. What’s an even worse pollution than that is a slighted journalist whose writings reek with a stink of suspicious agenda. Meet Manu Joseph: a non-entity until his Open magazine exposed

Pankaj Mishra returns to this blog after a longish absence. His column reviews two books (THE SUBTLE BODY: The Story of Yoga in America, Stefanie Syman and THE GREAT OOM The Improbable Birth of Yoga in America, Robert Love) and

It’s been about 10 years since I started this blog and this post is a personal stock-taking of sorts. This blog started as a space for personal rants/ruminations that made sense perhaps only to me. At a level, it still

So the Ramajanmabhoomi-Babri Masjid verdict has been postponed and it’s time yet again for doing what we’ve been known to do best: push problems as much as you can until they explode as they must. Meanwhile, the attitudes in the secular

Several months have passed since I published anything on the venerable Bhartruhari. In this installment, I present one of my all-time favourites from Neeti Shataka. Nindantu neeti nipunah yadi vaa stunvantu | Lakshmiih samaavishatu gacchatu vaa yatheshtam || Adya eva

Recall my series on Indology? Dr. N.S. Rajaram throws more light on the pathetic state of this discipline, which is all but extinct in the Western academia. WITHIN THE past year, the Sanskrit Department at Cambridge University and the Berlin

Great men are known for greater quirks. So it is with Karunanidhi–I leave his greatness to both your imagination and evaluation. A brief background before this. In the Hindu tradition, one of the ways greatness is measured is by suffixing

Guess who can beat Deepak Chopra’s record? Only Deepak Chopra. He’s truly nulli secundus. Despite calling his bluff on not one, but two occasions, despite the fact that he hasn’t answered any of my questions, I’m compelled to write again

What do we do today when we want to counter and/or curb corruption? We pass laws and hope that somebody “clean” will enforce them. But we know how that goes. And for all our pompous breast-beating about the hoary Indian

Jaffna at Secular Right muses on a “radical reinterpretation” of Hinduism and the caste system. In a sentence, the gist of his thoughts: Hinduism has never condemned a truly spiritual person on the basis of caste. The people he cites–from

I stopped reading this blog long ago but was directed to read a specific post by a reader. To be fair, the post is not the focus of this entry; rather, a puke-inducing poem written by some Salil Tripathi. If

This BBC report barely manages to conceal its glee over a recent farce ceremony where “hundreds of Hindu Dalits” converted to Buddhism or Christianity. Dissecting the BBC’s sleazy reportage is not the focus of this post.